Stuffed Peasant – Whispering to the Chef

You never know where a little Travel Whisper will lead you. It started at the Stuffed Peasant, in Collingwood, Ontario, Canada. It’s the kind of restaurant I love: an open kitchen run by a single chef. All I was going to do was congratulate him on the appetizer. But, as he turned to attend to the saucepans on the stove, he told me how proud he was of that dish, about how he had learned how to make it in his first year in the restaurant business and how he had kept the recipe in his back pocket for ten years, vowing to make it only when he had his own place.

As a little joke, I said, “So I won’t find the recipe on Facebook?”

He smiled and said no, but I could find it in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. Never having heard of this book, I wrote it down.

The next day, we’re poking around another little town, Creemore, Ontario when we saw a bookstore. My wife said, hey, maybe that cookbook you want is in stock. The woman minding the shop looked about 12 to me, but she was probably in her twenties. With her wool cap and tatoos, I didn’t think she’d know anything about cookbooks, but she did. Not only is this book world famous, but the updated edition just came out this week (after 17 years)! It turns out that it’s as popular as The Joy of Cooking among vegetarians. Who knew? Obviously, I had to buy the book.

On the way home, I was calling out little tidbits and hey, did you knows to my wife, when she said, “I’ve always wanted to do a risotto. Is there a recipe?”

So that’s how we got from a compliment to the chef to the Risotto Au Gratin that is baking in our oven right now. Who knows where a little whisper might lead?